After more than seven hours of blackout, it appears that the Internet has returned to Syria.
On Thursday morning, several internet monitoring companies began reporting a traffic outage in the country. While it was clear something was wrong, it was unclear who or what was causing the outage.
In the past, hacking groups such as Anonymous or the Syrian Electronic Army– a group loyal to President Bashar Assad – have launched internet attacks against the country. However, Thursday's outage appears to have two different sources.
First, a group calling itself the “European Cyber Army” claimed responsibility in a message on Pastebin. The group claimed to have launched the attack in retaliation for attacks by the Syrian Electronic Army on American and European websites last year.
The second group to claim responsibility was the Syrian government. In a message published on the country’s state-run Syrian Arab News Agency, the government claimed, “the Internet network and international communications were disrupted in all provinces due to a failure in the fiber optic cable.”
It is unclear which of these two scenarios actually caused the blackout. The outage began early this morning and affected almost the entire country, according to internet monitoring company Renesys. The only connection that was able to reach Syria was TurkTelecom, which was able to power the country's largest city, Aleppo.
